Your city's neighborhoods

[Docere]

What are your city's "official" neighborhoods for planning/demographic purposes? How are they defined?

Toronto has 140 social planning areas.

https://www.toronto.ca/city-governme...hood-profiles/

The criteria the City of Toronto uses explained:

Not all people define neighbourhoods the same way. The 140 neighbourhoods used by the City of Toronto were developed to help government and community organizations with their local planning by providing socio-economic data at a meaningful geographic area. The boundaries of these social planning neighbourhoods do not change over time, allowing researchers to examine changes over time.

In order to ensure high quality social data, the neighbourhoods were defined based on Statistics Canada Census Tract boundaries. Census Tracts include several city blocks and have on average about 4,000 people. Neighbourhoods are comprised of from 2 to 5 Census Tracts.

Like Census Tracts, most service agencies and their programs have service areas that are defined by main streets, former municipal boundaries, or natural boundaries such as rivers. These service areas include several census tracts. It is not uncommon for service areas of community agencies to overlap. Choices about neighbourhood boundaries were made to make the data in the profiles useful to as many users as possible, and are not intended to be statements or judgments about where a neighbourhood starts or ends.

The boundaries for these neighbourhoods were developed using the following criteria:

originally based on an Urban Development Services Residential Communities map, based on planning areas in former municipalities, and existing Public Health neighbourhood planning areas;

no neighbourhood be comprised of a single census tract;
minimum neighbourhood population of at least 7,000 to 10,000;

where census tracts were combined to meet criteria 2 or 3 above, they were joined with the most similar adjacent area according to the percentage of the population living in low income households;

respecting existing boundaries such as service boundaries of community agencies, natural boundaries (rivers), and man-made boundaries (streets, highways, etc.);

maintaining neighbourhood areas small enough for service organizations to combine them to fit within their service area; and
the final number of neighbourhood areas be manageable for the purposes of data presentation and reporting.

[Steely Dan]

Chicago has a two tier neighborhood system:

Tier 1: the 77 larger-scale "community areas" of the city. These are formally defined with hard and fixed boundaries. They are used for planning purposes and all kinds of demographic stat tracking.




Tier 2: the innumerable sub-neigborhoods that make up each community area. These are informal and much more loosely defined, with borders, and sometimes even names, that can change over time and are thus open for debate depending on who you talk to.



For example, we live in Chicago's "Lincoln Square" Community Area (#4 on the map above), but within that Community Area we live in the "Ravenswood Gardens" neighborhood. The other sub-neighborhoods of the Lincoln Square Community Area are "Ravenswood", "Bowmanville", "Budlong Woods", "Lincoln Square", "North Lincoln Square" and others.

The sub-neighborhoods, because of their fungible boundaries, are often abused by realtors who often try to stretch the boundaries of some of the more popular and trendy ones with statements like "only steps away from the hot andersonville corridor" when in fact the property might be a mile away. But they can't bend the rules with community areas because those boundaries are defined and fixed.

[Docere]

Chicago's community areas are likely the most famous demographic planning areas, I think they developed them at the University of Chicago in the 1920s.

[JManc]

[Buckeye Native 001]

The City of Phoenix has 13 urban villages:

[mrnyc]

hellloooo ....





edit -- this one is state opportunity zones by census tract:

https://www.cleveland.com/resizer/yl...1-standard.jpg

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by Docere

Chicago's community areas are likely the most famous demographic planning areas, I think they developed them at the University of Chicago in the 1920s.

Yep, chicago's hard-edged community areas have been locked-in for roughly a century now, with two major exceptions: the land annexed by the city for ORD in the 50s became the 76th community area, and edgewater was split-off from uptown in 1980 to become the 77th community area. That's why the numbering for those two areas breaks from the general northeast to southwest pattern.

[Comrade]

Salt Lake City is broken up into roughly 11 main regions:

Airport
Avenues
East Central
Capitol Hill
Central Business District (downtown)
Central City
City Creek
East Bench
Northwest
Northwest Quadrant
SugarHouse
Westside

Or something like that.

But then you have neighborhoods in each area:



And then you also have neighborhoods within neighborhoods.

Take Central City. Within the Liberty Park neighborhood is 9th and 9th, its own little neighborhood.

But like the Westside region is broken into smaller neighborhoods like Glendale, Poplar Grove and Rose Park.

Then you have the Ballpark and Central City, which is home to the People's Freeway neighborhood.

So, there you go.

[eschaton]

Pittsburgh has - officially, 90 neighborhoods.



I'm not sure the point at which these were decided as the official neighborhoods, but I believe the city picked these because historically they were coterminous with one or more census tracts. This is no longer the case, because a lot of census tracts in the city were combined due to falling population, but they can still be pieced together through census block groups.

The boundaries in some cases are a bit nonsensical due to census divisions being based upon blocks, and there often being steep topographical differences between one side of a "block" and another. But the bigger issue is the city just defines neighborhood in a much more granular way than most cities. Several of these neighborhoods only have a few hundred (or less) inhabitants. Five neighborhoods are more or less coterminous with historic housing projects (and in three cases the projects are gone. Many larger neighborhoods (The Hill District, Lawrenceville, Squirrel Hill, Homewood, etc.) are broken up into distinct neighborhoods even though they don't really have any sort of unique identity.

[SlidellWx]

New Orleans has 73 official neighborhoods. The neighborhoods were defined in 1980 by the City Planning Commission to divide the city into sections for governmental planning and zoning purposes without crossing United States Census tract boundaries. Most of the neighborhoods maintained the traditional names, but a few were concocted solely for planning purposes.


courtesy of nola.com

[Docere]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

Chicago has a two tier neighborhood system:

Tier 1: the 77 larger-scale "community areas" of the city. These are formally defined with hard and fixed boundaries. They are used for planning purposes and all kinds of demographic stat tracking.



Tier 2: the innumerable sub-neigborhoods that make up each community area. These are informal and much more loosely defined, with borders, and sometimes even names, that can change over time and are thus open for debate depending on who you talk to.

That's the case in Toronto too - a lot more neighborhoods that may often be the size of a census tract, but are used by residents associations, BIAs, realtors and so on - and do change over time. And yes realtors will stretch the boundaries.

Few neighborhoods are that well defined really. The Annex is an example of a well-defined neighborhood, its boundaries have been generally recognized as Avenue Rd. to Bathurst, Bloor to Dupont/CPR tracks. But the city for planning purposes puts Annex and Yorkville together. And realtors often stretch the definition of the Annex south and west.

Some names from annexed communities in the 19th century have held out (Riverdale and Parkdale) but others have disappeared.

[benp]

Here is the City of Buffalo planning map. Some of the neighborhood distinctions differ from the Google and Real Estate neighborhood maps, and as in other cities many neighborhood boundaries are very fluid.


Neighborhood Map by bpawlik, on Flickr

A - Allentown
BL - Bailey-Lovejoy
BR - Black Rock
CP - Central Park
C - Cold Springs
DD - Delaware District
D - Downtown
ES - East Side
E - Elmwood Strip
FL - Fillmore-Leroy
FW - First Ward
FB - Fruit Belt
H - Hamlin Park
HH - Hospital Hill
HP - Humboldt Park
K - Kaisertown
KE - Kensington
KH - Kensington Heights
LWS - Lower West Side
MP - Masten Park
NB - North Buffalo
P - Parkside
PO - Polonia
R - Riverside
S - Schiller Park
SB - South Buffalo
UD - University District
UH - University Heights
V - Vernon Triangle
WS - West Side
W - Willert Park

Here is a real estate based neighborhood map. Note that it has split into smaller neighborhoods in many areas, and changed Fruit Belt to Medical Center (likely as Fruit Belt has had a bad rep in past years).


Buffalo Neighborhoods by bpawlik, on Flickr

And there are some neighborhoods that aren't even shown on maps - West Village, Hyraulics, Larkinville, Iron Island, etc.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by benp

a real estate based neighborhood map..... changed Fruit Belt to Medical Center (likely as Fruit Belt has had a bad rep in past years).

yeah, realtors are notorious for doing that sort of rebranding thing pretty much everywhere i think.

when my parents bought their old condo back in the early '00s in rogers park, their realtor told them it was in "Loyola Park".

"Loyola Park" never used to be a neighborhood name (though it is the name of an actual city park along the lakefront), but apparently in the 90s, realtors starting using it to no so subtly differentiate the whiter south end of rogers park from the blacker north end.

[Docere]

One successful realtors' creation in Toronto is Roncesvalles, separating the poorer south Parkdale from the gentrifying areas to the north and closer to High Park (it's now quite affluent). When the city created its social planning areas two decades ago, a Roncesvalles district was created. However the city's planning district is a bit different from the Roncesvalles Village used by realtors (which includes the most affluent part right by the park as well as the "north Parkdale" parts). The average Torontonian views the area as a sort of hipster/yuppie "strollerville."

[mrnyc]

^ as if soho and tribeca aren't bad enough, don't get me started on hudson heights!

[xzmattzx]

Originally Posted by benp

Here is the City of Buffalo planning map. Some of the neighborhood distinctions differ from the Google and Real Estate neighborhood maps, and as in other cities many neighborhood boundaries are very fluid.


Neighborhood Map by bpawlik, on Flickr

A - Allentown
BL - Bailey-Lovejoy
BR - Black Rock
CP - Central Park
C - Cold Springs
DD - Delaware District
D - Downtown
ES - East Side
E - Elmwood Strip
FL - Fillmore-Leroy
FW - First Ward
FB - Fruit Belt
H - Hamlin Park
HH - Hospital Hill
HP - Humboldt Park
K - Kaisertown
KE - Kensington
KH - Kensington Heights
LWS - Lower West Side
MP - Masten Park
NB - North Buffalo
P - Parkside
PO - Polonia
R - Riverside
S - Schiller Park
SB - South Buffalo
UD - University District
UH - University Heights
V - Vernon Triangle
WS - West Side
W - Willert Park

Here is a real estate based neighborhood map. Note that it has split into smaller neighborhoods in many areas, and changed Fruit Belt to Medical Center (likely as Fruit Belt has had a bad rep in past years).


Buffalo Neighborhoods by bpawlik, on Flickr

And there are some neighborhoods that aren't even shown on maps - West Village, Hyraulics, Larkinville, Iron Island, etc.

I always took that first map with a grain of salt. That East Side is so huge; it seemingly takes up half of the city. That second map actually seems a little more accurate to me, at least in some areas (like northwest Buffalo). But like you said, some neighborhoods are missing. (Aren't the Hydraulics and Larkinville the same thing? And isn't Iron Island also known by another name?)

[benp]

Originally Posted by xzmattzx

I always took that first map with a grain of salt. That East Side is so huge; it seemingly takes up half of the city. That second map actually seems a little more accurate to me, at least in some areas (like northwest Buffalo). But like you said, some neighborhoods are missing. (Aren't the Hydraulics and Larkinville the same thing? And isn't Iron Island also known by another name?)

I had assumed that the Hydraulics roughly followed the path of the old Hamburg Canal from downtown, on which part of I-190 is built, and includes the Larkin area along with the what is now called Cobblestone area (also not on the map). I don't know what the boundaries of Iron Island were considered, but the Iron Island Museum is on East Lovejoy. I recall growing up that the Italians in the area wanted you to know that they lived in "East Lovejoy" and not just "Lovejoy" because, well, lets just say the other part wasn't Italian.

[Docere]

Seems like the Buffalo planners just took a big swath of the "bad side of town" and classified it as (unspecified) East Side.

[pdxtex]

Portland has 94 recognized neighborhoods associations but honestly I'm not really sure how effective they. Portland is a very top heavy planning environment with an ever increasing renter population. The recently ousted city commissioner wanted to do away with the associations and she got voted out. I guess they are still popular.

[galleyfox]

Originally Posted by Docere

Seems like the Buffalo planners just took a big swath of the "bad side of town" and classified it as (unspecified) East Side.

I think Chicago has always had a sense of strongly defined neighborhoods because there are very real geographic barriers no matter how rich or poor, homogenous or mixed the other side is. There’s a few boundaries that get fuzzy as demographics change and realtors play around with marketing, but nothing too dramatic.

North Side, South Side and West Side existed from the very founding of the city as the river separated the different settlements on either side and was very difficult to cross for many decades.

West Loop and West Town will never be the same neighborhood because there’s a ten foot railroad viaduct that will forever divide them. Many neighborhoods are surrounded on 3-4 sides by these viaducts or the river.


https://www.google.com/maps/place/33...e3e3b00aa76ef1